Backstage Angst

Aaron Sorkin returns to prime time.

Aaron Sorkin must love television—only someone who loves it could savage the medium so. The first episode of his unfailingly enjoyable NBC drama, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” about the backstage maneuverings at a late-night comedy show, opens with the program’s weary executive producer, Wes Mendell (Judd Hirsch, in a growling cameo), losing a battle with a censor at his network, NBS. When he is told that he can’t run a sketch called “Crazy Christians,” Wes snaps. He interrupts the live broadcast and tells viewers to switch off their sets. Observing that “people are having contests to see how much they can be like Donald Trump,” and “we’re eating worms for money,” he declares that TV is “making us mean, it’s making us bitchy, it’s making us cheap punks—that’s not who we are.”

His unscheduled “Network” tribute gets him fired, of course, and sets in motion events that will convene Sorkin’s glossy cast and frame the show’s emerging tensions. It happens to be the first day at work for the network president, Jordan McDeere (Amanda Peet), but she’s an unorthodox sort who agrees with Wes’s assessment and is amused by the ensuing ruckus; that very night, she hires Matt Albie and Danny Tripp to restore the show—and her trashy, bottom-feeding network—to their bygone glory. Matt (Matthew Perry) and Danny (Bradley Whitford) are a prickly but talented creative team who worked at “Studio 60” before going on to success in films; they arrive over the objections of the NBS chairman, Jack Rudolph (Steven Weber, in a nifty turn as a corporate infighter), who, having forced the pair out once before, fears, correctly, that they will bring him nothing but grief.

Wes’s jeremiad flatters NBC, which airs “The Apprentice,” with Donald Trump, and also “Fear Factor,” the worms-for-cash procedural, but which is also bringing us Sorkin’s critique. More important, it flatters us: we’re not cheap punks; we don’t really watch all that high-rated crap, no sir. Sorkin charms us into tagging along as he sets out to re-create a golden-age-of-television atmosphere. His title winks at fifties shows such as “Studio One” and “77 Sunset Strip”; the second episode invokes the famous “You’ve got spunk” exchange in the pilot of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”; and the entire enterprise is patently inspired by “Saturday Night Live.”

Wes’s speech also reminds us how heated and hyperbolic, how scripted, Sorkin’s shows are; he had a hand in writing almost every episode of his sitcom “Sports Night” (I got to know him when I was reporting a piece on the show) and almost every episode of the first four seasons of “The West Wing.” Sorkin’s characters don’t get into pickles in the usual TV ways: breaking the law to help a victim (“Law & Order: SVU”); obeying unseen voices (“Medium”; “Ghost Whisperer”); having sex with the wrong person (“Desperate Housewives”); or burying a goombah in a landfill (“The Sopranos”). They get into pickles because they mouth off—and it’s great television because television prizes banter above all forms of conversation. Other shows’ characters get mouthy (think of Dr. Gregory House on “House” or Ari Gold on “Entourage”), but Sorkin’s spar and bluster like the flap-jawed hacks in “The Front Page.” Jack Rudolph, when he wants to put Jordan in her place, barks, “I got news for you, sister.” Sister! Can “toots” be far behind?

Jordan remains unruffled. Sorkin gives Amanda Peet a perfunctory foible—she gets people’s names wrong—but he clearly wants us to adore her. It helps that Peet exudes cool-eyed mischief as a woman whose awareness of her colleagues’ ill will only increases the wattage of her poise. When Jordan refuses to kill the “Crazy Christians” sketch despite the threat of a fundamentalist boycott—“I made them a promise,” she says of Matt and Danny—Jack looks at her incredulously, and we begin to wonder: could this supposed television executive be an escaped mental patient? No, just an appealingly counterfactual network president along the lines of “The West Wing”’s appealingly counterfactual President.

The “boys,” as Jordan archly calls Matt and his best friend, Danny, are the heart of “Studio 60.” Matthew Perry has one of television’s most familiar faces, but the fecklessness that he sometimes exhibited on “Friends” has been replaced by a seamanlike weathering. Willing now to let the camera close to trace his anxieties, Perry is winning as an impulsive writer drawn back to the show—in part because he has unfinished business with his ex-girlfriend Harriet Hayes (Sarah Paulson), a Ketel Martini-drinking Christian who is one of the comedy program’s stars, and in part out of loyalty to Danny. Bradley Whitford’s Danny pretty much had to take the job, because he has just tested positive for cocaine use and can’t get insured to direct movies. Whitford was rumpled and staunch as Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff on “The West Wing”; here he seems filled with a rage so deep it emerges as fatigue. Often he’s hunched over like the coach of a losing team, but, wherever he is on the screen, our eyes are drawn to him. For all his watchful ministering to Matt’s moods, Danny may be the first to blow.

On “Studio 60,” no conversation is so delicate that it can’t be held on the fly in a crowded hallway. Sorkin’s longtime creative partner, the director Thomas Schlamme, revives “The West Wing” ’s famous walk-and-talks; his Steadicam prowls down hallways and across the stage and above the length of the writers’ conference table and even through a mullioned window, coiling itself around the colossal set and its squadrons of hurrying extras. We are always glimpsing, over shoulders and through doorways, the characters who will play the next scene, and at times watching “Studio 60” feels like rubbernecking an accident from the passing lane. But the A.D.D. camera style suits Sorkin’s writing; his characters frequently jabber at someone who chooses that moment to look elsewhere.

In the second episode, Matt is complaining to Danny while Danny, half-listening, watches a closed-circuit feed of Jordan, who’s in the next room handling questions from television critics prior to introducing her new show-runners. In less than sixty seconds, Sorkin establishes Matt’s anxiety about not having enough time to retool the show; Matt and Danny’s mutual contempt for their deputies; that Matt still has a crush on Harriet and is worried she’ll find out that he’s been sleeping with another cast member; that Wes’s speech is now the leading topic on talk radio; and that Danny may have a crush on Jordan. A few minutes later, when Danny blurts out to the critics the real reason he’s back—his cocaine use—we realize that he was inattentive backstage in part because he was girding himself to confess. This is terrifically economical stagecraft.

Yet Sorkin’s dialogue falls on the ear better than it holds up to scrutiny. When Harriet asks Cal (Timothy Busfield), the director who kept Wes on the air, if he’s O.K., he responds to her not as a friend but as a straight man:

{: .break one} ** CAL: I’ve been told to sit tight and wait for word. . . . HARRIET*: Word on what? CAL: I faced off with Standards during a live broadcast, Harry. The guys I know who’ve done that feel lucky when they can get a job directing “Good Morning, El Paso.” ***

Similarly, when Jordan assures Danny that she’ll keep the secret of his drug test, he scowls:

{: .break one} ** DANNY: That’s nice, but I have no reason to trust you and every reason not to. JORDAN*: Why? DANNY: You work in television. ***

There’s something rum about these people. In the pilot, Harriet tells Matt that their relationship turned sour after she went on “The 700 Club,” and “you got cold and you got mean.” In the second episode, after Harriet finds out about Matt and her fellow cast member, she tells him, “That’s just mean.” The scenes don’t quite play. One problem is that Harriet is more a conceit than a character. A more serious issue is that meanness and stupidity are the worst things Sorkin’s characters can think to accuse one another of. For all his sniping at Christian bigots, a hobbyhorse going back to the pilot of “The West Wing,” his theology doesn’t seem to encompass any shading of evil. As a result, his characters can feel like Pinocchios—motor-mouthed marionettes hoping to promote themselves to real live boys.

Here, as in his earlier shows, Sorkin’s gang seems diverse and all-American and meritocratic, but it is really an aristocracy of talent; the characters repeatedly disdain the growing reach of the rabble. When the cast member Tom Jeter (Nathan Corddry) reads aloud a negative appraisal of the show from a blogger named Bernadette, his fellow-performer Simon Stiles (D. L. Hughley) asks, “Why do you care? She’s got a freezer full of Jenny Craig and she’s surrounded by her five cats.” “The New York Times is going to quote Bernadette so that the people can be heard and the Times can demonstrate they’re not the media élite,” Tom says gloomily. “I prefer when they were élite.”

When the network’s executives meet to discuss the Wes situation and how to channel the passions it will stir up among that rabble, they gather around a table that looks very like the War Room circle in “Dr. Strangelove.” But Sorkin isn’t a satirist: he doesn’t want to mock the suits so much as gain a seat at the table. We are meant to be impressed that hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake and by the array of concerns that routinely warp the creative impulse.

At the same time, these corporate sensitivities are useful as obstacles that Sorkin throws in the path of his writing proxy, Matt, who worries in the second episode, as airtime approaches, that he doesn’t have a “cold open”—the show’s first sketch, which has to strike a perfect note of historical awareness, contrition, and impudence. I won’t spoil the spare-no-expense solution that he and Danny and the cast finally come up with, except to say that Matt, beginning the search for sets and costumes, asks, “What do we have that says ‘Legacy of Television’?” Most writers would fade out there. Why risk bombing with the actual sketch, thereby eroding our belief in the characters’ talents? But Sorkin lets his majestic production number roll, and the gamble pays off. He more than convinces us that Matt (read: Sorkin) could run “Studio 60” or, for that matter, “Saturday Night Live.” The show handsomely succeeds in creating that golden-age feeling; it is entertainment—with all that the word suggests, and doesn’t—of the highest order. ♦